I have been telling my wife we should not go back until Covid cases are down in Msia but she really misses het younger sister very much. My wife's father and oldest brother has also passed away in the last 12 months and she couldn't go back to KL to attend the funeral.

If you are selling your house now, you are probably making a motza. House prices in every state has gone crazy - this makes house owners very happy and confident. I can see all my retiree friends all so happy in the last 6 months . All our investments are shooting up and Aussie dollar is very strong. How long the party will go on for, well, that is anybody's guess. AT the moment all oldies are party-ing and feeling very confident - a big of that is because most states have been experiencing 0 new cases for the past few months and people are moving around without needing to wear masks.

Thanks for the information - didn't realise that it is so hard to get back in.

A friend of mine is trying to get back to Sydney from Penang and he tells me that there are plenty of seats on MAS in July/August but they are quite expensive (economy). He has to come back to Sydney to fix up his super, driver's license and a few other important things and he has not been back in Sydney for 17 months now. I was under the impression that it is quite easy to get back as long as you book like 3 or 4 months ahead. I haven't seen passengers complain they are bumped off from MAS so i suspect they must have stopped doing that - there were scores of complaints about being bumped off coming back to Aust earlier in the year esp from MAS (no complaints from SIA about being bumped off). I hope MAS has improved as people were warning others not to fly MAS as they were unethical and were only profit-driven.

I got a couple of friends living in Campbelltown - one worked with me for 23 years and his house is now about A$750k (probably gone up A$150k in the last 12 months - not bad when you calculate percentage-wise ) .He has a townhouse as well as investment property and it should be worth about A$550k now (probably was about low A$400k 12 months ago).

Interest rates are so low now for home loans (below 2%p.a. for fixed rates).

Thanks for the information - didn't realise there are allocated quarantine slots per flight. I read from passenger comments from flights flying in that planes were mostly full and i had the impression that airlines could just fill the plane up with passengers but what you say makes sense.

I walk past two quarantine hotels when i am in Chinatown (you can normally tell they are quarantine hotels as there are security guards at the front of the hotel all the time and these guards have masks on all the time). I can see quarantined guests in the balcony waving to their relatives on the ground floor.

Australia has been very lucky to have the virus under control and economic activities can continue - when i told my accountant that i may be relocating soon to Msia, he was telling me that i am crazy to be leaving Aust now when everyone wants to come back

Yes - i am back in KL now and currently in hotel quarantine (Pj Hilton). Service in Pj Hilton is quite good and i got a personal bellboy doing things for me (i tip him a lot!!).

All my friends tell me that i am crazy to come back to KL at this stage. My old badminton buddies had a farewell dinner for me at Zilver Rest (all friends that i had played with for more than 25 years) two weeks earlier. We had about 24 people attend the dinner.

I have another week to go before i am out of quarantine. My wife and i will be living in our apartment in Mont Kiara - we will probably go out only for essentials. There will be a lock down in KL on 1 June - goodness knows how long the lock down will go on for! We got people buying things for us so we will probably not need to go out much. Our relatives are so happy we are back in KL.

One of the reasons why i decided to come back now is because of the onset of winter. My wife and i really dislike the cold and has decided to risk Covid coming back to KL (in favour of the warmth). I was initially thinking of going to Queensland for 3 months over winter before considering whether to come back to KL. After much consideration, i thought i will risk it coming back to KL.

Hopefully i won't regret my decision coming back to KL a year from now. Anyway, i can always go back to Sydney to live if i don't like it here in KL. My wife is the one who is really very happy as she gets to be with her younger sister.

We have been renting the unit to Uniglo - it used to be very easy to get Japanese/Korean tenants. Nowadays tenants are very fussy and want furniture rearranged around the unit - my wife doesn't like tenants with a lot of demands. We used to rent it for rm6k/mth six years ago and now rental for a comparable unit is only rm4k. My wife has left the unit empty for more than a year now and an agent was looking after the unit for us. I have asked my wife not to buy the unit in 2014 and she paid rm1.25mil (you probably get one for rm 900k+ nowadays). What can i say since the money is hers so i better shut up. My wife is keen on living her golden years in KL as she is very close to her younger sister so she feels her future lies in Msia. I on the other hand will live anywhere as i am quite easy going and i don't have any kids to worry about. I have left most of my retirement funds in Australia and have transferred a small portion of it back to ringgit (which should last me at least 5 to 6 years). I can easily transfer more funds to Msia as i have developed a good working relationship with the remittance officer in Maybank Bangsar Baru. The Maybank officer was interested in investing the funds that i have moved back to Msia.

I got quite a good exchange rate when i transferred using Maybank telegraphic transfer (around 3.15) from CBA. I like the CBA online transfer (max limit A$50k) and fee is only A$22 per transaction. It is so convenient for me to just move my retirement funds back to Msia using the online website. However, i don't think i will need any more Msian ringgit for a long while

Yes - everyone in Sydney told me not to come back to KL so soon. My uncle who usually lives in KL (aged 83) and has PR in Aust panicked last minute and decided to wait - he was supposed to come back 10 days before me.

I don't think the situation in Msia will get much better even after a few months. People in Msia have a different mentality from Australians. When i was in Sydney during the outbreak last year in March to Sept, we hardly came out of our home. I notice people here in Msia loves going out and finds it very hard to stay home. Maybe it is the culture of the society.

My retiree friends in Sydney are all happy with the strength of the Aussie dollar and the world share markets indices. Everyone of my retiree friends in Sydney is feeling very confident - all splashing money by going out to eat a lot and buying new cars!! Superfunds in Aust are all performing well and the baby boomers are the lucky generation. On the contrary, business people in Msia seem quite pessimistic about the way the Msian economy is going. Makes me a bit guilty splashing money when all my friends in KL seems to be cutting back on their expenses

My wife is very much against using the vaccine - i was initially thinking about getting the vaccine before i come back but my wife is adamant she will not want to have the needle. I just go along with my wife's decision since it is more her decision to come back to Msia than mine. She just wants to be close to her younger sister in KL (sometimes i feel my wife lives for her sister who is two years younger than her). If it is not for her sister, we may not have come back to Msia to live.

Anyway, we will see how living in KL turns out - we may not like it after some time and may head back to Sydney to live. Looks like being in KL at this time may not have been the best timing but well, now we will just have to stay at home all the time and wait it out - i suspect it will be a long wait

This post has been edited by Garysydney: May 31 2021, 10:58 AM

All my friends and relatives in Sydney tend not to go out much and usually stay at home a lot even before Covid days. Malaysian visitors would visit us and tells us our lives in Aust are boring!! But that is the culture in Australia. I have lived in Sydney since 1981 and this is the type of lives (quiet) we lead over there. When i come back to Msia for my holidays, people here are all the time busy going out which is totally different to the type of lives that Aussies live.

I am quite okay with staying home all the time because i have been doing very much that in Sydney. Now it is getting cold in Sydney due to winter while it will be much warmer here in KL which is what i like. I kind of enjoy being back in KL now even though the Covid cases are high - money wise my wife and i are very comfortable. All our relatives in KL are happy we are back but we will not be seeing them any time soon . Got to be a bit careful so we don't want to see anyone yet for at least a couple of months.

Inclined to agree with you. However it looks like the rollout of the vaccine in Msia is quite haphazard. I don't think my wife will agree with me to get vaccinated

Most of my retiree friends in Sydney are delaying their vaccine jab. Only our 83-year old doctor friend is going ahead with his jab. Due to Sydney being so 'clean', we tend to get quite complacent with not taking the vaccine. My group of friends are just taking the winter flu jab for the time being but not AZ yet because they are still worried about the blood-clot issue. Our GPs in Sydney are all telling us to wait until end of this year where Pfizer might possibly be available to the over-50s.

The mood in Sydney is still filled with optimism. People there are more afraid of getting the winter flu than Covid. Without a furious outbreak in NSW, i suspect Sydneysiders will wait until Pfizer is more readily available. Property prices are shooting up strongly as well as local stock prices due to this optimism. When and whether this optimism will fade will be interesting to observe in the next few months

The govt has this philosophy that strong housing prices gives 'confidence' to people. Whether it is flawed policy or not, no one can really tell until later. At the moment, everyone in my retirement group is bragging to each other that the house they live in has gone up A$500k and their retirement portfolio has also shot up A$290k in the last 6 months - what could be more rosy than that? Retirees are all smiling now (esp the self-funded retirees). Hopefully this dream can continue or could be sustained as everyone of us retirees are feeling good

The only problem is nowhere is cheap in Sydney - unless you move to regional towns or interstate but where are you going to find jobs in regional towns?

The only problem is wage increments is only between one and two percent - a bigger wage increment is required to sustain house price growth. At the moment borrowing costs for housing is so low and this is causing a lot of people to go crazy borrowing to buy residential properties (together with the other factor FOMO (fear of missing out)).

People who have not got onto the property market yet will find it even more harder now to get on.

Without help from FAMA, there is no way in hell the younger generation will be able to set foot on the property market.

I have a younger friend who is finishing his medical specialist training soon and even people like them are having difficulties accumulating the deposit required. These people will eventually end up being the top 1% earner in the country but the first step is so much harder nowadays compared to my time. Getting into Sydney or Melbourne market is the hardest.

This post has been edited by Garysydney: Jun 10 2021, 06:48 AM

You have done well by buying in

Sorry i couldn't have a second lunch with you as i was quite busy with relocating back to KL. Now that i am here, i have no regrets. Things here are a lot cheaper than Sydney and weather is quite okay for me. I am now living in Mont Kiara (my wife's four bedder) and it is so big that i feel a bit uncomfortable as i have to shout when we talk when she is in the bedroom (and me in the lounge). I go out for my morning walk everyday at 7am and there are a lot of morning walkers as well. I have not had the need to use air-conditioning so far so weather is not a problem for both of us.

This post has been edited by Garysydney: Jun 10 2021, 12:07 PM

You have done pretty well with two kids in University. Are your kids living together in Sydney? It must cost you a bomb to have these kids in Sydney.

I think with the way Malaysia is going, a lot of people will be looking to migrate - you can see it is very obvious that Chinese have no future here anymore. I am retired now with quite substantial retirement assets but i really feel for those with less financial resources. Very sad indeed. I think it is good for you to help your nephew go overseas. You are in deed a good uncle indeed

Wow! Three kids in Australia. Must be costing you a fortune

You have an interesting wealth of financial knowledge that you share across LYN - to be honest at my age now, i am not so keen to chase more wealth esp since i don't have kids and i think i should have enough to last me through my golden days. I have been extremely lucky to inherit quite a lot of assets through my parents to which i have been extremely grateful.

Read from SMH that today in Sydney, it was the coldest day for 37 years. Must be freezing there. Lucky i am not in Sydney now otherwise i would have to wear a few layers

Definitely agree with you.

If younger migrants have to suffer because of the high cost of buying a roof over their head and the need to pay it off over 20-25 years, their quality of life will definitely suffer. I like Brisbane maybe because of my age and my dislike of colder weather. However all my friends and relatives are all in Sydney so i may not have a choice but to live in Sydney if I decide that KL is not to my liking - just that i may have to run off to warmer places during winter.

At the moment, my wife is really liking it in KL. Due to being stuck in Sydney since Jan 2020, i find the variety of food so fascinating and plentiful in KL (even though we cannot eat in). I just have to be careful when going out and not go too near other people